Category: Interviews

I’ve been in-house at many different organizations, from a huge pharmaceutical company, to big public-facing non-profits, to a tech start-up. I’ve been lucky to work for a variety of excellent leaders and general counsel, and I believe that has given me a leg up in this role. That diversity of experience helped me learn the flexibility required for this role and how to handle the different types of issues I regularly tackle here.

I didn’t always want to work in-house – when I came out of law school I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do – but when I got married and started thinking about starting a family, I felt if I wanted to continue to be a lawyer and practice actively, in-house was the best route to go. I had watched women leave large firms to go in-house for years. I think in-house roles have always been perceived as better for women, because there are more development and promotional opportunities and a better work-life balance. In reality, my experience has been that being in-house is a better place for both women and men – and especially for working parents. Those development and promotion opportunities do tend to happen in a much more fluid way in-house.

Now, as general counsel, I see my role more than anything as a problem-solver. The biggest leap into this role required relying on my judgement and having the confidence to back myself. I had been an employment lawyer for almost 20 years before I became a general counsel, and it was tricky to take the confidence I had in my judgement as an employment lawyer, and transfer it to other legal areas. It only took a couple of days, though, to see that, even with my focus on employment law and my varied career, I’ve had exposure to all kinds of different legal and business matters.

To get that exposure, it was key to work at different organizations with different risk appetites, different business models and different types of leadership. Exposure to a diversity of legal problems and problem-solvers prepares you for a job like this. Given my own experience, my advice to attorneys looking to move into a GC role is to take chances and to not hesitate to try different organizations and different types of roles, and don’t get stuck. Being at one place for too long can make it hard to have the flexibility and exposure you need to take on a role like general counsel.

As for other challenges in coming to this role, one that stands out above the rest is giving legal advice to the former President of the United States for the first time! In terms of the wow factor, you can’t beat that.

Beyond that, moving from a fast-paced technology startup to the Foundation has been a challenging transition. Adjusting my pace of work and the way I think about risk assessment to a much more careful and deliberate approach took some adjustment. Even though every place has to manage reputational risk, managing it at the Clinton Foundation is different from most others.

Probably what prepared me best for that aspect of this role was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Museum is also a public-facing institution that gets an enormous amount of press, so the risk appetite there is pretty similar to that of the Foundation. The way in which the legal department at the Met thought about issues and how they might play out at the Museum was quite similar to the way that we think about issues here: first, of course, is what is the right thing to do? Then we start thinking about if we get media coverage, what would it look like, what would it mean for the roles of the principals, how would this reflect on board members? Those are questions that a tech startup or a big pharma company wouldn’t necessarily be thinking about in the same way.

About 80% of the work I do at the Foundation is typical general counsel work, ranging from board governance matters to reviewing partnership agreements and large contracts, weighing in on compliance issues, advising on legal matters in foreign countries, working with outside auditors, HR-type issues, as well as being a member of the senior leadership team. The other 20% is special because we are the Clinton Foundation: I might be working with our communications team responding to media requests, or managing issues that are specific to our particular board leadership, the Presidential Center and work around the President’s legacy.

I’m proud to be working for the Foundation and to get to see the work it does up close and through the legal lens. Whether it’s helping small shareholder farmers in Africa, fishermen and women in South America, or folks struggling here in the US, all the programs that the Foundation runs are incredibly important, and getting to be a part of them is rewarding. Right after I started here, the massive hurricanes hit in Texas, Florida and the Caribbean. The legal department supports the Foundation’s work in the Caribbean which includes helping to coordinate aid, working with Caribbean countries in their efforts toward alternative power solutions and distributing medical supplies to devastated areas. Even being a small part of that has been very, very gratifying.

The legal department at the Foundation is a very strong and diverse group, and many of the members of the department have been at the Foundation for quite a while. One of my goals is to make sure those individuals see a path forward for their careers. I’ve benefited from working for several strong leaders who took a keen interest in my development as a professional. I’m looking for ways to do the same for my colleagues at the Foundation. When you’re in a small team at a relatively flat organization, it can be hard to help individuals figure out how to develop themselves and what the right next career steps are. I think that being an excellent people manager is becoming a very important role for general counsel – really understanding who’s on your team, where they’re looking to go, and how you can help them get there. We all want to have high-performing teams that make important contributions to the organization. Getting there is not something they teach you in law school.

Luckily for me, I have a partner in the Foundation’s HR department. We have a strong mentoring program here and other learning opportunities to help employees at the Foundation develop career-wise. As general counsel, I view it as my job to make this in-house legal team a great place to work. That means making sure the work is interesting and challenging, that the team is diverse and that individuals can see a path forward for their careers, and that they can balance their work life with all the other things that they need and want to spend their time on.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is the use of metrics. We haven’t used them a lot in the legal department at the Foundation (although of course the Foundation uses them to measure the work we do around the world), but it’s something I’m looking at more closely to make sure that the legal department is spending the most time on the work that’s most important to the Foundation. One thing I learned working in the start-up world is that understanding the work qualitatively, and quantitatively, even in the legal department, is part of the good management of the group.

No matter what your practice, getting international experience is incredibly important. I think it is great advice for all in-house attorneys these days to get international exposure. Whether it’s doing an international deal, working on setting up entities internationally, or working on an employment law issue or lawsuit internationally – anything that gets you out of your US jurisdiction to see how different it can be to practice in other places is a good start. Just knowing what questions to ask if you are going to be doing business in Japan, or Malawi or Colombia will put you a step ahead of colleagues without those experiences.

For the eight years prior to joining Planetary Resources, I was in-house counsel with the US State Department, in the Office of the Legal Adviser. I spent the first couple of years handling international arbitration matters on behalf of US investors involved in disputes with foreign governments. I then spent six and a half years working on international technology matters – partnerships for the development of technology, for regulation of advanced technologies including outer space, and I also was responsible for international environmental matters, including in the Arctic.

I came to the State Department with a bit of an unusual background for an international lawyer, having focused on IP and technology law as much as international law. Because of my IP background and my comfort and facility with technical subject matter, a lot of the State Department’s work involving science, advanced technology, and innovation policy accreted to me over the years, and I was able to handle a lot of international technology transactions over the course of my time there.

Planetary Resources recruited me as its first general counsel a little more than a year ago. I think that they’d seen me in action in the years in which I was the US representative to the United Nations Outer Space Legal Subcommittee, and in space policy circles, crafting legislation for the next generation of commercial space activities. I had wanted to go in-house at a technology company, and this was a particularly compelling opportunity because the team is just extraordinary – it’s an exquisite collection of professionals and colleagues working on a very difficult world-changing mission.

I think I was as interested in space as any young person with a pulse, but compared to many I work with, it wasn’t a primary passion. I am more generally interested in technology, technological innovation and the research and development process – and space resource utilization, as a next frontier within the next frontier, is particularly interesting in this regard. And in that sense, working with a team of talented engineers and scientists on really hard problems – particularly ones that present difficult questions with regard to regulatory and economic dimensions, in addition to the technical dimensions – is quite satisfying.

Very few days have gone by in the last year when I haven’t done something entirely new to me – if not entirely new, period! But the leap was not as much as I expected, and actually eight years as an in-house counsel at the State Department turned out to be pretty good training. At the State Department, I found myself fielding questions that no one had ever thought about on quite a regular basis and I had to do something with them, so I found the pace of the GC role familiar. I think it uses a lot of the same muscle groups that I had developed in guiding large, international partnerships and transactions through to completion. In the past those might have involved governments, and the form might have been a treaty, but it was a similar skillset, a similar set of dynamics and similar challenges that arose, which felt very transportable to complex corporate transactions.

I feel strongly that the role of the general counsel, particularly in a technology company, requires enough of an understanding of the company’s technology to understand how to optimize legal transactions to facilitate research and development, rather than constrain it. I feel like I’ve had good success in doing that and working very closely with our technical teams to understand their needs, their interests and what the pain points are, and also to help them to understand the legal landscape and to craft creative legal solutions that dispense with things that might have placed drag on the innovation process.

I think that it’s quite important for the GC to be able to understand the technology and the business well enough to be able to provide legal advice not in isolation, but that integrates an understanding of the business and technical dimensions as well. The general counsel doesn’t need to be able to design the spacecraft (and probably shouldn’t!) but they do need to understand the key points of what challenges the engineers are facing, and where there are legal solutions that can mitigate some of those challenges.

On the practice management side, necessity is the mother of invention. Being a GC of a company at this stage, there is so much to do in any one day, across so many different things, that you need to be quite creative in managing work flow. I’ve taken advantage of the very talented software developers at Planetary Resources to create systems and workflows to manage how we handle non-disclosure agreements, for example. Part of it is process design, part of it is a little bit of back-end automation, but things like that make a difference not only in preventing me from becoming a choke point, but I think also have served the users of those documents well.

For some things, like funding rounds, you need the horsepower of a large firm to move with the speed and quality that we need. But also, in a startup that has big world-changing mission and vision relative to the size of its budget for outside counsel, I’ve had to be quite creative and sparing with what I do in-house versus what is outsourced. I’ve done some experimentation to figure out what’s possible, and whether we can do more with less. One example is that I’ve experimented with preparing some patent applications in-house, and worked with patent counsel to refine, finalize and file them – which is a large work burden in-house, but enables us to file for more patents than we would otherwise.

There seems to be smaller practitioners, even solo practitioners, with sterling credentials who have experience both with the very top firms and also in-house, who are providing services at comparatively approachable rates. There are all kinds of software platforms springing up too, that connect in-house legal departments with those people, who are harder to find. I can’t say whether that’s a trend yet, but it’s certainly interesting, because as a GC in a startup who is doing lots of different things on lots of different fronts, you have to be quite creative on how to stretch the budget for outside counsel. Anything that allows us to get the same level of quality for less is quite attractive, and something we will probably explore.

A fun part of the job is the chance to be a pioneer in determining how the international legal framework applies to space resource utilization and how the national legal frameworks plug into that, and that fits very well with my background. Right now, for example, I’m in The Hague at something called Track 1.5 diplomacy, where representatives of governments, academic institutions, companies and NGOs come together outside of a formal treaty-making process to try and develop a set of building blocks that might later be injected into a law-making process. But that’s a rather small percentage of what I do day-to-day. I do more in the realm of either corporate transactions, IP, contracts, export controls, as well as labor and employment law. There’s quite a lot of Delaware corporate law, for example, which makes it challenging to stay on top of, but ultimately makes for more certainty in the answers.

The general counsel of a company as innovative as Planetary Resources needs to see himself or herself as an integral part of that innovation engine. It’s too easy as a lawyer to be quite conservative and risk averse in ways that can choke the innovation process, so it’s incumbent on the GC to have a very good understanding of where the risks and opportunities are, and to have excellent judgement in balancing that to enable the rate of innovation that our investors expect, without taking on undue amounts of risk.

I started out at a big Wall Street firm. I received excellent training, and worked on different matters for different clients, but I aspired more than anything to work for one single client.

I was just a fourth-year associate when I transferred into PepsiCo, which was nearly 20 years ago – so I’ve essentially had a career within a company. When I joined, the law department had a reputation for insourcing as much of the work as possible, and that was critical to me because I needed to continue to learn.

That’s really been my story for nearly 20 years – PepsiCo is a place where if you do your current job really well, we will let you do something different, even if you don’t theoretically have the experience from a subject matter perspective. I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of different things internally that I don’t think I ever would have gotten if I had gone to the open market. So it’s been a good learning environment for me, and it’s in the DNA and the culture of PepsiCo to allow that to happen.

I’ve had the benefit of being at the company for a long time, so I think I have a good understanding of the business, the organization, the risk profile and the risk tolerance. But in taking the role of general counsel, the biggest learning curve for me was the necessity to really lift my perspective from any one particular part of the company, to an overall perspective – a broader view. The decisions that I’m involved in now definitely impact different parts of the company, and making sure that I understand and appreciate the multifactorial element of any one decision across the global business is really important.

Currently, I oversee the company’s worldwide compliance and ethics, public policy and government affairs, and legal functions. I often find myself cross-checking what impact there may be in any one of those departments, even when the issue doesn’t squarely fit within that particular department, in order to ensure that I’m not missing a potential impact of a decision made in one part of the company on another part of the company.

It’s hard for me to concede that anybody would be prepared, on day one, to handle all the various aspects of my role. No matter what background anybody would have, there’s going to be learning that would have to happen after you get into the role. I’m biased, but the benefit of having worked at PepsiCo for so long has meant not having to learn so much about the business, which can be very difficult to get to by itself. My time is very much pulled into matters that are global in nature, rather than the detailed parts of the business, but fortunately I have been able to learn the business from the ground up.

I would love to be able to tell you about some Thomas Edison-like moments during my first 100 days in the job in which I have innovated and invented something that’s new and novel! I can’t say that I’ve done that. But what I would say, having practiced law for 25 years, is that there’s been ongoing, continuous improvement. You’re constantly finding ways to do things a little faster, a little quicker, a little bit more insightfully. Certainly the sharing of information and the storing of knowledge is an important part of what we do, and the things that we’ve invested in within the legal team are really around information preservation, as well as enabling more efficient flow of work.

Thinking about the evolution of legal services, I’m not sure that there’s some big cliff or huge step upwards, whether in-house or in private practice. I certainly anticipate that efficiency models will continue to come to bear. For example, possible technologies that are rooted in artificial intelligence, or that are driven to figure out how big volumes of work can be carried out more cost-effectively, or even some predictive models around the magnitude of risks in the litigation environment. I anticipate people will get faster doing what they do and there will be attempts to be more predictive about trying to quantify risks. But I do think that legal services, at the most critical moment, is a judgement-oriented deal. My mind doesn’t go to innovation or models that will ultimately provide answers, my mind goes to models that will help provide information that ultimately will inform the judgement that lawyers have always historically had to bring to bear.

The role of my team is to mitigate risk for the company. When you get into mitigating risk from a business leader’s perspective, that means doing something different or allocating money, time or resources. A lot of times, lawyers are very good at highlighting the risk, and saying that it’s a ‘big risk’ or that it’s a ‘material risk’, but I think in order for us to really effectively influence, assist and counsel our business clients, we actually have to be willing – and a little bit more evolved in our ability – to put a value on that risk, so that a business leader can ultimately weigh it against the value of the resources, time or energy that he or she might have to place in order to mitigate that risk. I push our lawyers here internally to be innovative in their ways of thinking about risk and how to put a value on that risk, which really is at the core of helping advise our business around making actionable decisions.

Frankly, a lot of the best moments for me are successes that are unseen – knowing that we helped advise or guide the business client to avoid a risk, so that the risk never manifested. In some ways, those are instances of secret successes that make a difference.

The general counsel is certainly one of the go-to counselors for the CEO and the board, but it’s not just on the law, it’s on a whole broader series of topics – whether it’s ethics, public policy, corporate citizenship, even geopolitical risks. It’s the wearing of these multiple hats that has really evolved over the past decade – going from just being a legal adviser to being an ethical watchdog, dealing with rule of law matters in developing markets and ultimately being involved in protecting the corporate reputation. At its core, there’s still a fiduciary duty that the general counsel has to the shareholders, but the role has certainly broadened. Candidly, I almost view the title of general counsel as being unduly narrow as a description of the full role.

General counsel ultimately have to become masters of different vectors of influence. When I look to the north, I see a CEO and a board and the shareholders, and I have to influence them on the things that matter most to them. When I look to the south, I lead multiple functions, and I’ve got to ensure that there’s the right talent and skills and that I can grow the team individually as well as overall. To the west, I see my peers, and whether it’s head of human resources or the chief financial officer, I need to be able to understand their perspectives on things in order to collaborate. To the east, I see a lot of external parties, from government officials, to NGOs, to competitors and industry groups that I also have to engage.

In the past, some individuals would be good at one of those vectors and maybe two, maybe three. But now, I don’t think there’s any one of those vectors against which the general counsel can afford to be ineffective.

One’s ability to influence is rooted in having substantive subject matter competence as well as personal character – which means that you are trustworthy, and you live by a certain level of principles. Across each one of those vectors, I need to be substantively competent in the issues that any one of those groups cares about. And then I need to be good at the point of contact, just as a personal proposition: I have the character, my word is good, I carry through on my commitment with truth and honesty. And then you’ve just got to ultimately work hard and be humble enough to learn from and listen to everyone you come into contact with. Hopefully, over the course of time, with some intentionality about learning across each one of those groups, you develop both that sense of character and competence.

When I was growing up, there was a TV show called The People’s Court, and I fell in love with the law through watching that show. My parents would tell you that when I was three or four, we used to watch The Paper Chase, and I said I wanted to be a lawyer even then! But I actually did not plan on going in-house when I started practicing law. In fact, my path to becoming a GC is a result of being willing to try new areas of the law, being flexible and, at various points in my career, expressing an interest in taking on more responsibility.

I started my career as a litigation associate at a big New York law firm, where I spent some time working on labor and employment matters. I found myself enjoying them a great deal – in part because the legal team was smaller than a typical commercial litigation team and I had more client interaction. I left my first firm and joined another large firm known for employment matters. After being there for a year, I joined Viacom Inc., a client of the firm’s, as a litigation counsel. While at Viacom, I worked with a strong set of attorneys (both in-house and outside counsel), and they continued to train me and mentor me.

Fast-forward to December 2005, when Viacom and CBS split into two separate companies. I transitioned to CBS Corporation, expanding my skillset by taking on new responsibilities in the compliance realm, and ultimately becoming the corporation’s chief compliance officer in 2009.

After six years in that role, I was promoted to GC at Simon & Schuster, a CBS business unit. I didn’t have much experience in the publishing industry, and also I was six months pregnant with my second child when I started in the position! I did not hesitate in making the transition though, because I welcomed the opportunity to partner more consistently with a defined set of business clients. I also wanted a better understanding of the business from the operational side, which I would not necessarily gain from a seat in corporate. And, both my S&S CEO and CBS Corporation GC were very supportive as I got up to speed with my new responsibilities.

My experience and background in litigation and compliance serve me well, as I’m used to jumping head first into trying to develop a subject matter expertise in the context of a litigation – for me, that keeps things interesting. I applied that same skillset in getting up to speed on issues that affect Simon & Schuster and the publishing industry as a whole. I’m one who learns by doing and it was very important to me to get a sense of what it’s like to see a manuscript proposal before it’s even acquired, and to understand how it becomes a book and ends up in the hands of a customer, or digitally on a customer’s e-reader.

There is a significant transactional component to my role. When I’m drafting an agreement, I’m mindful that it could be years from now when there’s an issue about its interpretation, so it’s not just about clarity in the moment, but creating language that in the long term does not have ambiguity and does not expose the company to risk. I find my litigation background to be helpful in this regard, as well as in advising the clients about potential pitfalls.

As general counsel, I manage the legal and contracts departments and our team handles much of the day-to-day agreement drafting and review, manuscript vetting, and general counseling and advice. When we work with outside counsel, we base those decisions on counsel’s areas of expertise, their fit, their ability to develop favorable and flexible rate structures, and our focus on ensuring that we work with a diverse pool of lawyers.

General counsel are becoming increasingly adept business leaders and strategists. There are many aspects of the role that go beyond traditional legal advice and expertise. A mastery of a legal specialty might get you into this role, but it’s certainly not going to keep you in it. You have to be able to articulate legal advice in a comprehensible and succinct way, to weigh, balance and forecast risk, and to understand business strategies and implications – which frequently present in ways that are not obvious. Sometimes, the general counsel’s role is viewed as limited to providing legal advice for the c-suite, but you also must work with other people at all levels in your organization and learn the ins and outs of your business. Otherwise, you are not getting the full perspective that you need to be a strategic partner.

You need a certain mindset in order to think strategically. Part of that is about possessing some financial acumen and a better understanding of business concepts. It is also about being willing to step outside of your comfort zone. If you are a lawyer who is interested in the legal substance, but not operations or marketing or how deals are negotiated or the factors that might impact into your business, then a GC role is likely not for you.

Obviously, we lawyers also have to set an ethical tone and lead by example. One consideration for me (particularly as a former CCO) is: how do you do that in way that does not feel too prescriptive? One of my mentors described it as being mindful of overly medicating a patient – we must consider ways in which we can embed ethics into business practices without making colleagues feel like they’re being hammered over the head by Legal.

Honestly, EQ is a big component of that as well. It’s about the ability to relate to people. One of the ways in which you can learn is by being an approachable person; you then are a partner and a collaborator, so people don’t feel they are running to the principal’s office every time they talk to the legal department. Business teams need to feel that they’ve got someone who’s going to sit down with them and figure out how to get from point A to point B in the most effective way. When you read the newspapers and you see situations where things have gone awry, sometimes it may be about a lawyer’s advice not being followed, but other times it’s because in-house lawyers have become siloed.

If I could speak to my younger self, I would tell her to trust her instincts and to know that she has good judgement – which is a critical component of being a strong lawyer. I’m a first-generation American (my parents are from Barbados), and I’m also a woman of color. Sadly, as I pursued my law degree, I didn’t know many attorneys of color and I didn’t see many in high positions in the legal community either. As I look back and think over my career, there have been several points where I have thought about not raising my hand, not giving my opinion, or doubted myself out of fear. I definitely had to affirmatively say to myself: ‘Trust yourself. You’ve got this.’ That attitude has served me well.

At Simon & Schuster, and at the CBS corporate parent level, we have internal committees and policies that are focused on areas of diversity and inclusion. We have a law department committee that’s charged with focusing on the diverse outside staffing of matters and, along with other internal committees, we focus on ensuring that a diverse pool of candidates is considered for our open positions.

It’s important for people to share their experiences, and that’s one way that I have been able to grow and blossom both as a person and an attorney: by spending time talking to people with more experience about the legal profession and their personal journey. I’m acutely aware that I did not have the opportunity until I was in college and law school to be exposed to people of color who were in the legal profession. So, I stay in touch with the next generation – at all stages of their paths. Future generations (particularly diverse individuals) must have a lifeline to those who came before them. That can be through mentoring and sponsorship, and also by providing a realistic picture about what life as an attorney is like. Each person should have someone who dreams bigger for her than she can dream for herself. That’s worked for me and I hope I do that for others.

I have spent my entire career here at Ford, and it’s a special story that I’m really proud of.

I grew up in Syracuse, New York, and I went to undergraduate law school in Buffalo. My wife was a year behind me in law school. We looked at law firms in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse – it’s a beautiful part of the country and we really had a desire to stay there. But as you scanned the major law firms at the time, I don’t believe there were any black partners, there were very few women, and I couldn’t identify any gay or lesbian partners. We therefore concluded it was not likely that I would be successful in any of these firms if others that looked like me had failed to achieve success. So I didn’t even look for a job in the area where I grew up and wanted to live. But we did see a diversity of lawyers achieving success in places like New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC. And so that���s where we decided that I would look for a job.

It only happened to be that Ford was at a Black Law Students Association job fair, and I was intrigued by the company and in-house practice. Up until that point I had really only thought about going to a law firm.

After my second year at law school, I clerked at Ford for the summer, and when I went back to law school in my third year, I was given an offer of full-time employment, contingent on finishing law school and passing the bar. I vividly remember taking the bar exam on the Wednesday and Thursday, taking the weekend off and starting work the following Monday.

The thing that attracted me to the idea of being in-house at Ford was that it was the size of a good law firm. Today, globally, there are 620 in the legal office, but at that time it was significantly larger. Ford’s legal department handled its work predominantly in-house, and the idea of being able to see the issues from inception to conclusion and then living with the business consequences is what intrigued me, as opposed to working on discrete issues – where you may not understand the business imperative.

The way I’d describe the company and the way the legal office is run, is that it’s as close as I’m ever going to get to an entrepreneurial experience inside a company. The company has always been very innovative and very open to new ideas and new thoughts, and there has always been a keen focus on talent development. The intellectual challenges here are just so rich, I also had the opportunity to take on new assignments every three or four years within the legal office, and I have continued learning and growing – so I’ve stayed.

Being the assistant general counsel was helpful in taking on the general counsel role, in part because I was also the corporate secretary. So I wasn’t getting to know the board for the first time when I became general counsel – I understood the governance requirements and the CEO and board responsibilities at that level, so that bit of the transition was quite natural.

Having grown up here, the existing relationships that I had changed when I became general counsel. I sat on the operating committee of the office of the general counsel with my peers, all of whom were very talented and any one of them could reasonably have expected that they would be GC. So part of this job on day one was re-recruiting my peers, and acknowledging just what incredible lawyers and leaders they are, and reaffirming that all the fantastic work we had done as a leadership team was going to continue.

And then relationships with the rest of the c-suite were a little different. As corporate secretary, you’re helping to facilitate the needs of the c-suite, and so moving to become their peer was a great opportunity to interview them about their perceptions of the office. I tried to take on what I perceived to be misperceptions about the risk appetite of the office, and asked the question, ‘How have your business imperatives been constrained by the legal advice you have received?’ My objective was to understand the real barriers they’re dealing with as they’re trying to advance their business objectives, and what are the barriers that are perceived which we could eliminate.

When I found out about getting the GC job, there were three things I did: I told my wife over lunch that day, I started re-recruiting my peers, and then I took time to sit down and come up with a transition plan. I had the privilege of having two and a half months where I had overlap with David Leitch, our former general counsel, and in that period of time I focused on developing external relationships. I’d done a fairly good job of establishing networks as I moved up, but that peer group isn’t all moving up to general counsel at the same time. The general counsel role is so unique that it is just so helpful to have other GCs to call on, because there isn’t anybody on your team who’s experiencing the same thing that you’re experiencing. That network of GCs is just so important to be able to tap into to bounce ideas around some of the challenges you are facing.

I also spent time getting ‘boot camps’ by going to different law firms, based on their expertise, to go deep in areas of the law where I hadn’t practiced before. I also started to spend time with senior folks at law firms so that I could develop a crisis management plan. My instinct was that I needed to find a good set of lawyers that could really help me if I had a crisis – lawyers that are battle-tested and have been through crisis before, so that a team would be already in place should the need arise.

I rise at 4:30am every day thinking, ‘How am I going to beat my competition?’ I’m fiercely competitive and so are our lawyers, and innovation is a big part of that. I think of it in three phases – now, near and far. I draw a circle for ‘now’, I draw a bigger circle around it and I call that ‘near’, and I draw an even bigger circle around ‘near’ and I call it ‘far’. I obviously have to spend time in all three areas, but where my most significant value can come from is thinking about the ‘far’, because if we can anticipate both where the law is going and where the business is going, we can identify solutions that are out in the far and then try to bend them back to today. If I can reach out toward the future in how I’m thinking and bring those solutions back to today, the curve that comes back is my competitive advantage – that’s how we can contribute to beating the competition.

What that practically means is that in the now, I am using firms that are using AI for e-discovery. But as I think about the far, we also have a team of people thinking about how artificial intelligence can actually be used to write patent applications. We’re in the process of exploration about what that could look like, and there’s a number of tech firms who are experimenting in this space, so we spend time with them, considering issues like, do we do we enter into things like a joint development or joint venture agreement with them to more fully explore it together?

We are also considering artificial intelligence solutions in the contracts space – not just in terms of writing basic agreements, but is there a way to use AI to really help evaluate the aggregate risk that we have in our contracts portfolio, and is there a way to help people make good choices about the trade offs they’re making when they’re negotiating contacts? Which vendor to go with, what jurisdiction is going to govern, indemnity provisions – there’s all kind of trade offs people make when they’re negotiating contracts, but can AI help optimize results for us relative to our total portfolio of contracts?

In the future, I do think that the way we work will be very different. Just imagine a technology-enabled practice that has more virtual reality to it. It’s not that we’ll be interacting with holograms necessarily, but it could be that we shorten the distances between each other globally. Why isn’t there the technology to support better video interface so that it feels as if people are appearing in the chair across from me so that we can have a much more human interaction than say, the telephone or low-definition video? I think that will help in relationships with law firms, but I also see it being really beneficial in courtrooms as well – in interactions with witnesses and judges. I see ultimately advances there where the level of pro bono work we’re all doing to provide people with access to justice will be technology-enabled, and will be able to help more people to get access to justice.

When I was in private practice, I represented McKesson in a number of significant litigation matters. About 2010, the general counsel approached me and asked me if I would ever consider going in-house, because the head of the litigation group was planning to retire. I hadn’t been thinking about going in-house, so the question came to me out of the blue. I was very flattered to be asked, but I didn’t think that was the right move for me at that point. But he kept talking to me over the course of the next year, trying to intrigue me on the notion and finally, in 2012, I came on board as head of the litigation team and associate general counsel.

I had to really get a deep understanding of McKesson, because even though I’d represented the company in multiple cases beforehand, I really could not have imagined the rest of the issues and products and services the company was involved in until after I came on board. It was certainly a learning curve to understand all the different ways that McKesson was adding value to the healthcare system.

For me, that was a great opportunity to feel like I could be a student again in a way I had not been for so many years, because I had become so familiar with so much of the work I was doing, it became second nature. Now I was in a great position where I could learn and develop new knowledge and new skills.

In June 2014, I became general counsel a little bit unexpectedly. I learned in the middle of June that the GC was leaving the company and that I, along with two of my colleagues, would be interviewed as the potential replacement. Two weeks later, I became GC and she was gone. It was a fast transition, but a wonderful opportunity for me to add value at a level that I had not known beforehand. As daunting as my two weeks’ notice was, I could really dive in and help the decision-making for a much broader audience than I had been facing before.

One of the first things I had to do was meet with a variety of people to make sure I had the full breadth and understanding of what my role would entail. The general counsel organization that I head up is not just a legal department, it’s also the compliance department, the public affairs group, the corporate secretary function, and I had soon also formed a legal operations function. So initially it was a deep dive into making sure I understood the roles, responsibilities, goals and priorities, and really got to know the people who would be on my leadership team even better and understand what their teams were working on.

But then obviously I was now also a member of the executive committee of the company, and I had responsibilities towards our board of directors. On a daily basis, I was managing a variety of legal and business issues, working with the business leaders from across the company, working with the HR team and the leadership team to help drive employee engagement and career development, dealing with outside counsel and the like. My world had expanded dramatically.

All of this was happening at a time of great transition for the company itself, which was about to go global. We had just acquired Celesio, a public company with employees and operations in multiple countries across Europe – countries that McKesson had not ventured into before. So at the same time as I was digesting the organization that I was going to run, I was helping the company digest what it would mean to be much more of a global enterprise with distinct regulatory landscapes in Europe and all of the new issues that we would be facing. On top of all that, over the previous three years there had been significant changes in the healthcare world globally – our customers and suppliers in our traditional markets were undergoing massive consolidation and disruption, and government oversight was increasing everywhere. So my transition to becoming general counsel was really at a transition point for the whole healthcare environment as well.

If I were to advise anybody else who was about to make a transition similar to mine, the two things that come to mind are agility and prioritisation. When I started, the issues were constantly changing and the challenges we were facing and decisions we had to make were accelerating at a pace that I don’t think we had seen in the three years before I became general counsel. In light of that, I really do think it requires nimbleness and an ability to move from one issue to another with a keen sense of how one has to prioritize.

When I came to the company, I had always understood that the mission of the general counsel organization was to be trusted advisers that the company would turn to for help in mitigating and managing legal, reputational and competitive risk arising from existing laws or laws we were seeking to advance or change in some way. But as we began to see the landscape changing, I was very much inspired to start thinking about forward-looking values that my organization could contribute. I changed the mission statement to be a vision statement, and in addition to the important role of mitigating risk, I really started thinking about whether there were more active and strategic ways that we could help the company. We thought about ourselves not just as the team that got called when the company wanted to tackle a difficult issue, but we wanted to be the team they called when they wanted to innovate in what they were doing or think about new ways that they could add value to the healthcare system.

In the course of that, over the last three years we’ve done a number of things to demonstrate to the company that when we have a seat at the table, we can help them think about new ways to deliver value to our customers and our shareholders. We’ve been brainstorming about innovative processes and technologies, like having a standardized process for how the businesses will enter into contracts – a contract library that will reduce contract review time and improve how quickly our businesses can enter into contracts with their customers and their suppliers.

Another example is when, over a year ago, some folks on my team thought it would be a great idea to form a task force across the company to bring together subject matter experts from a variety of different areas to help brainstorm possible solutions to the opioid crisis that the US is facing. People from the law department, the public affairs department and the compliance departments started working with some of our business leaders, including some that are doctors and pharmacists with a deep knowledge of the different points that a patient navigates when seeing a doctor, dealing with insurance companies, dealing with pharmacists and so forth.

Over the course of many months, they published a white paper, which they’ve now shared with legislators. It contains ideas for ways we could change laws, or get better training or tools to help pharmacists or doctors manage some of the tough issues that the opioid epidemic has created. The company has made a number of recommendations, some of which have been adopted or touted as good ideas by state and federal legislative policy makers. Most recently, we helped the company form a foundation dedicated solely to addressing issues surrounding the opioid epidemic. Having a legal team that understands what it takes to put a foundation together and the expertise across the team is another way of transforming what the general counsel organization can do going forward.

Being a part of advancing ideas like these has been an incredibly rewarding part of what my team has been able to participate in, and I do think it stems from the fact that we all got together and embraced changing the role of our organization from just risk mitigating to being risk mitigating plus value adding.

I spent the first 10-12 years of my career working as a labor and employment specialist. Then, I spent about five years in private practice, before I finally moved in-house. I had found out pretty early on that I valued the long-term relationships and the business engagement that comes from working inside a company, so when the opportunity came up to work in-house at 3M Company, I took it. At 3M, I spent a number of years as a labor and employment lawyer, but then was asked in 2008 to take a general counsel role for the company’s consumer segment. After that, I spent seven years working in business roles and had terrific opportunities to move into international legal leadership roles as well as become the company’s chief compliance officer.

On assuming the general counsel role at CHS in 2015, the biggest learning curve was the responsibilities relating to governance and the board of directors. I had board committee assignments in prior roles, but being the board’s lawyer where you have to advise on their responsibilities and fiduciary duties to the company, represents a very different challenge. I had to learn how to walk the line of: yes, I’m part of the management team, but I also have very clear and important responsibilities as the counsel for the company. How to navigate those dual roles was a big part of that overall governance-related learning curve.

Our board is comprised of 17 people. You’re building relationships that are not just task-based, only requiring attention as and when an issue comes along; you’re there all the time. I’m responsible for educating and counseling them, and I’m aware that board members must learn quickly – it’s not like there’s an orientation period in which one can get up to speed. This in itself is a big challenge.

One time stands out as being particularly challenging for me in this role. CHS is a cooperative, governed and owned by more than 600,000 farmers and ranchers across the US. We were going through a process to amend the membership provisions of our cooperative, and I was on the front line of the communication strategies relating to the change because they were governance-related changes. I was actually communicating with the members, and a lot of them were quite vocal in their views about how things should be. Our owner members are passionate about CHS and they are willing to share their views, which is terrific. At the same time, figuring out how to be an effective communicator with an audience of owners was very different to my prior experience and, frankly, I learned and got better over time by having communications that didn’t go so well.

I also lead on compliance and government affairs. In that latter space, the big challenge is that government affairs and lobbying activities are a very different sort of world than most corporate lawyers are dealing with. There’s a system of how things work and the rules that operate in that system are all very different than the rules of the courts, where lawyers are traditionally trained, or rules of transactions, where lawyers spend a lot of their time. I’ve had to spend time as a student of my government affairs team, having them explain to me why their strategy on a given issue is the way that it is, how things work and how the role is done in a way that drives the company’s reputation forward.

The compliance area is much more comfortable for me, because I was the chief compliance officer in a prior role. I believe it’s a wonderful training ground for general counsel, because compliance is very, very important, but also because it is based on process and systems. General counsel need to get more familiar with how processes are built and operated, and the role of systems in managing risk.

Project and process management is going to be more and more important for in-house counsel. I am asked on a regular basis to take responsibility for a project or for an initiative – and that’s not just negotiating a contract or a transaction. It involves a number of other skills around establishing how are we going to move from the objective to the goal, the steps of the process, what process tools should we be using, how do we want to communicate change management issues to people – and, again, that’s a skillset that needs to be built.

With hindsight, the advice I would give to myself is to be more proactive at building relationships with the level of leaders below my c-suite peers. I spent a tremendous amount of time with my direct colleagues and the board of directors, but I should have done more to get to know the business unit leaders. They are the people who are most important to the operating rhythm of the company and to our risk management practices. Most employees in the company will look to their business unit leaders for guidance relating to culture, appropriate behavior and day-to-day leadership, and had I accelerated my learning and meeting with those people, I think I would have known more about the company earlier.

As general counsel, we’re going to have to get even more involved in understanding the business – and not just where the business is, but the strategies of the business and where the business is going. We’re going to have to be more familiar with the markets, the customers, the competitors and the products of our company than we ever have been in order to be effective at being proactive in our advice, and to be strategic in the issues the company is facing.

You need to be very open to any opportunity that comes your way that doesn’t fit in the narrow model of business lawyer for a company or law firm lawyer. If there’s an opportunity to take on a project, or to be part of a project team that is completely unrelated to what you do day to day – my advice is to take that opportunity. If there’s an opportunity to go to a new area of law, even if it’s for a limited time, take it, because you’ll have to stretch your skillset and your way of thinking and you’ll have to learn new ways of working, not only with other people, but just working in new areas. I’ve never taken an assignment where at the end of it I said, ‘Boy, I wish I hadn’t done that.’ It’s always been, ‘I’m so thankful someone gave me the opportunity to do something different.’

Looking to the future, I think that globalization is going to have an impact on the role of the general counsel. We have not seen the final stages of globalization yet. Because of this, I think there is going to be an increase not only in the risk profile that companies take on, but in the complexity of managing risk within the business. That’s something that I think relates very directly to the general counsel’s role.

As well as that, I think that people who want to be general counsel need to get more global in their perspective. I don’t mean necessarily living outside your home country, but I think having that global perspective and being able to understand and value the differences in cultures, and being able to be inclusive in how you work with people, whether they are next to you or whether they’re 5,000 miles away – that’s a skillset; it’s not just your nature.

As the workforce keeps changing – its composition, generations, geographies, working in one building versus working remotely – we have to be better at building relationships. I don’t mean being good communicators, like being able to give a good speech or a good talk, I mean the fundamentals of building relationships with people who might be very different from me in age, or in how they approach their work. At the same time, these relationships are going to be harder to build, because it won’t just be someone next to me or down the hall anymore – they are going to be far away geographically and culturally.

When I started my career, I didn’t have any preconceptions of where things would lead. I clerked for a year then headed to the New Jersey attorney general’s office, where I cut my teeth on labor and employment cases, while spending a lot of time on my feet in court. I enjoyed the role – the cases were stimulating – it was a great place to learn, to make mistakes and to develop my style.

After leaving the government, I took the road less travelled and joined a large class action shop in New York City, focusing on plaintiff’s side work, where I helped litigate the ‘MTBE MDL’ environmental contamination cases. I represented a number of states and municipalities across the US in recovering groundwater clean-up costs from the refiners and additive manufacturers – and felt a little like Erin Brockovich. The experience was a turning point in my career, where I was forced to think strategically about large pieces of litigation from the opposite side. I can’t replace those three years on ‘the dark side’ with any other experience, and they continue to shape the way I view smart litigators and a good litigation strategy.

After leaving the firm, I joined Tyco International’s law department. Tyco had just hired a new general counsel, Judy Reinsdorf, and she was building out a new department. The company was still wrestling through the morass of litigation brought on by the missteps of its former CEO, Dennis Koslowski (imprisoned in 2005 for fraud). The company was in a dynamic time and undergoing significant change. I had outstanding mentors, both in the business and within the law department, and my time at Tyco fostered my interest in continuing my career in-house. It was an exciting time to be an in-house lawyer at Tyco, and it felt a little like Christmas every day as we worked through enormously complex issues with an exceedingly talented and dedicated team.

I left Tyco to lead the litigation department (and later the compliance function) for The ADT Corporation – a spinoff of Tyco – in 2012. At ADT, I worked hard to achieve cost reductions through in-sourcing and initiated a legal cost recovery program, yielding significant seven-figure checks to the company every year. I reported to the board’s audit committee in my role as chief compliance officer, and enjoyed the unique perspective of wearing both the litigation and compliance hats. The experience helped me think more tactically, and gave me a bird’s eye view of our enterprise. I enjoyed implementing risk mitigation measures to address operational gaps, and it was exciting to be part of the solution.

After ADT was sold to Apollo Global Management, I took a position with PSEG as its deputy general counsel, chief litigation counsel and assistant corporate secretary. Though my time there was brief, it helped prepare me for the general counsel’s office at Kelly Services.

I joined Kelly Services in the fall of 2017, and it has been exciting to join one of the most recognized and trusted brands in the workforce solutions space. Though Kelly has been in business for more than 70 years, it is constantly evolving: the past year alone has brought a new CEO, a focused go-forward strategy, and a more connected, energized culture.

My most significant challenge has been learning the industry and the workforce solutions space, and I have been spending the majority of my first six months listening, processing, learning, and understanding.

Kelly has a diverse full-time and part-time talent pool, and I strongly believe that an organization will not yield the best result or reach the best decision unless there’s engagement from differing backgrounds and perspectives. I just joined Kelly’s diversity and inclusion committee, and am excited about the company’s initiatives in this space. We impact the lives of those we’re able to touch, and our employees make up the fabric of our commitment to doing the right thing, always.

Kelly is also looking at the future of work. The company is evaluating technology as a tool to secure efficiencies in connecting people to work, and I am currently evaluating an electronic contract review platform that will increase service levels and support to my internal clients. Kelly is examining the benefits of utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning, and implementing the use of bots, so we can serve our customers and talent more effectively in a highly competitive and evolving marketplace.

It’s important that the general counsel’s office evolves in lockstep with ongoing changes to technology. Technology introduces tremendous advantages that often carry inherent, but manageable risks. Our team is vigilant and disciplined in keeping abreast of developments, and educating our internal and external clients about the legal implications of tech in their business.

It’s important to closely partner with our business as opposed to acting as just a legal adviser, and in-house attorneys need to be business partners that are integrated into the decision-making process.

I believe that the most important quality for a general counsel is judgement. We’re in this office to make difficult decisions, and having a deep knowledge of the law and regulations isn’t enough anymore – it’s building influence and offering real commercial solutions. Lawyers are traditionally trained and valued for their technical expertise, but in-house attorneys and GCs really need to learn how they can best add value to the organization by understanding context.

Getting to the GC’s office may involve taking different roles along the way. Remaining in one functional area may not necessarily be the best route. If you have the ability, try different areas: jumping from litigation to compliance, to the corporate secretary’s office, taking on an expat assignment or even taking a business role – these are all experiences that help prepare you to become an effective general counsel.

Whatever role you’re in, don’t be afraid to ask questions. Joining a new company and a new industry has a lot of challenges. People at Kelly have been generous with their time, helping me to accelerate the inevitable learning curve that comes with joining a new company. But when you join a new organization, make sure that you’ll have access to the support and resources you’ll need to become effective. If you don’t have those tools or resources available, or you don’t feel secure in asking questions, failure is certain. And don’t be afraid to ask the simple questions. Oftentimes, including a fresh perspective causes people to rethink and re-evaluate things, which is never a bad thing.

Becoming general counsel was actually not anything I ever planned. What led me here was a series of jumping on opportunities and being willing to take a few risks along the way.

After law school, I clerked for a judge, then I was at a law firm for a couple of years, and then I went to the District Attorney’s office. I always wanted to be a trial lawyer, and I really loved the criminal side of law. I thought I would be a prosecutor for the rest of my career.

But then, in 2008, my husband founded a software startup, and the condition of the investment was to relocate to Silicon Valley from Atlanta. We had to move at 30 days’ notice, which meant I had no opportunity to even register to take the California bar, much less study and pass it!

So we moved, and I got a position at Gibson Dunn. They did not have a strong presence in white-collar criminal defence and internal investigations in the Bay Area, and so I was very focused on that as well as a number of general litigation matters. I ended up really loving that experience, especially what I was doing on the white-collar and the internal investigations side. Over time, about half my job became advising clients on the effectiveness of their compliance programs and even helping them establish compliance programs.

One day, I received a call from a recruiter asking if I’d be interested in creating the compliance department at this new solar energy startup that was backed by Elon Musk. I absolutely loved it. l was at Solar City for three or four years and then, when the acquisition by Tesla happened, I was asked to take over and lead and create a formal compliance department for Tesla.

In the spring of 2017, once again a recruiter contacted me, this time about compliance for Credit Karma. I wasn’t quite sure that I wanted to make a move from Tesla but then, out of the blue, Kenneth Lin, Credit Karma’s CEO, asked if I would be interested in making a move to become their chief legal officer. I decided to take yet another leap of faith and do something that I had not done before.

On one side, as anyone coming into a new role will say, there’s an intense learning curve in getting to know the company. How does it operate? What are the specific challenges they face? What are all those different ways people do things? How are things structured that might be different from what you’re used to? And on top of all that, because it was my first time coming in to lead an established legal and compliance team, I had to get to know the team and what people were focused on and how I could best help.

Those are all challenges in any in-house role, but fintech is a highly regulated space, and we are in a hypergrowth period at the company. I was very fortunate to have worked with two companies previously that were both extraordinarily innovative and doing something very disruptive, and which were also going through hypergrowth phases. That was actually fairly familiar and it’s something I find very exciting – I don’t think I would have made a move if there was not that level of innovation and excitement here. I encourage myself and my entire team really to embrace the change, embrace the idea that we’re doing things people have not done before, and recognize that this presents really interesting challenges and once-in-a lifetime opportunities for attorneys and compliance professionals who are figuring out how do we do these things in a legal and compliant way.

The first thing that I have focused on has been really ensuring that we all, as a team, have an innovative mindset. A lot of folks in legal and compliance departments get a bad name as the ‘department of no’, where you’re trying to stop things or shut things down. What I’ve been very much encouraging my team to do when someone comes to you very excited about an idea, instead of having a knee jerk reaction of: ‘Oh we need to put the brakes on’, is to think: ‘How can I be a really great partner? This is an interesting idea, let me look into it, how can we make this happen in a legal and compliant way? What can we do to embrace that change, to walk with our business partners and help manoeuvre around potential landmines or blocks, so that we’re really in it together?’ Rather than setting up an environment where business partners feel that they have to push against legal and compliance or try to avoid us because we’re going to get in the way.

I see a lot of my role as being one of educating, be it our members, our regulators, our external business partners and others, about what it is we’re doing. Most of the consumer protection regulations in existence line up very perfectly with what we’re trying to do, and so that makes it fairly easy from that standpoint – we are trying to help people make sense of something that has traditionally been really complicated and confusing, and give people transparency and clarity in making financial decisions.

As far as looking at the current regulatory regime, oftentimes many of these laws were put into existence decades ago, well before anyone even thought about fintech, and before any of these things were even possible. How do we make sure that we are abiding by the spirit of the law? There’s much that is in a gray area, and that is actually really fun and interesting to think about – how do we set things up to make sure that we’re doing the right thing now and in the future?

Companies need people who understand the business inside and out, and the industry. They need people who understand how many of these complicated regulatory regimes intersect, and who can help navigate where laws are under development, or where there’s not a lot of consistency and clarity. People who can sit back and take a holistic view and help guide their executives and board on the ethical way to go, the safe way to go, and also make sure that we’re providing plenty of opportunities for the company to innovate, be creative and try things that are new.

I would say the other side of it is seeing your entire legal and compliance department as a business unit in itself, and thinking about how you can make sure that you’re building the right team, that you have ways of evaluating what the team is doing and how much value you are providing to your business partners. How you function with legal operations is another big area, and having that business sense and applying it to the entire legal and compliance function is critically important.

I think if I could go back and tell myself anything as I took on this role, it would be to trust myself even more and realize that everyone, especially in the tech space, is learning a lot as they go. There’s not a hard and fast playbook, and there’s not going to be a lot of tried and true lessons that they can plug and play. It’s important to not be afraid to ask what may seem like stupid questions. Really get in and be willing to roll up your sleeves and – especially if you’re working in the tech space – dig in and understand the technology. Don’t assume that anyone has already looked into something and don’t necessarily take something at face value. There may be a way of doing something that people have not thought of yet, or a different approach in how you design your products that could completely get rid of any potential legal risk. Just really focus on that creativity. That would be my advice – just be comfortable with the fact that no one has one this before and so it’s fine if you don’t necessarily know all the answers off the bat.

My path here was intentional, although the irony is I really was not a huge sports fan growing up. I really fell in love with it in college, and pretty immediately started working in sport. In a lot of ways, I’ve grown up in the business, so part of what I fell in love with was the business of sport as well as the game of football. I worked in sports media and communications before going to law school, and I entered Stanford with the goal of returning to sports.

My 1L summer, I asked the Raiders, for whom I had been a PR intern in college, if I could come back as a law clerk, which they were very gracious in allowing me to do. I went to law firm Akin Gump for my second summer, because I knew that partner Dan Nash did a lot of work for the National Football League (NFL). I worked at Latham & Watkins after I graduated, and then at the NFL League office in New York. The 49ers’ EVP of football operations, Paraag Marathe, got to know me from my work at the League, and he asked me if I would interview for a position they had just created here – which was director of legal affairs. There were a lot of people, including my own family, who said: ‘Oh that’s so nice to hear you’re going to interview – you’re never going to get that job!’

The team’s executive vice president, Patty Inglis, had created the position with a plan in place to groom me to eventually become the general counsel. The role grew as I created our external affairs department. Shortly thereafter, we added a risk management department. Last year, we aligned a number of departments to create our community impact team, which is a conglomerate of the 49ers Foundation, community relations, 49ers Prep (which runs free youth football camps and flag football leagues), our STEAM education program (where we invite in 60,000 kids a year to get them excited about science, technology, engineering, arts and math through football), external affairs, fan engagement, and the 49ers Museum.

My role as general counsel felt like a natural evolution. It was really the beginning of my time at the 49ers where the learning curve was the sharpest. There was so much I was doing on the business side that was unfamiliar to me. My first few months, I didn’t know if I would make it every day. I was here 10 hours a day – but I was growing.

Inglis and I were building the infrastructure of the legal department with things like a contract management system, while working to get Levi’s® Stadium built – so that was a really intense couple of years.

I received a lot of very good advice along the way to becoming general counsel from Inglis and other general counsel, such as to learn the business underlying each contract and therefore draft or negotiate a better agreement, and how to hone those contract-drafting skills.

Like many GCs, the struggle is in trying to step back and think strategically for the future, while not completely suffocating in the fires you need to put out every day. A lot of it is risk management, especially now in the current business environment – looking at the risk profile of various business decisions and determining what’s best for the organization both from a brand and revenue standpoint. As general counsel, we have a particular lens for seeing potential downsides and evaluating their likelihood and severity.

As a general counsel, more of your role becomes about leading other people than about being a really expert attorney in a traditional, technical sense. It becomes more about soft skills and your ability to manage and lead attorneys and non-attorneys alike. My advice to people who want to become general counsel would be to develop the ability to teach and lead others, and to communicate with and influence peer departments in the business. We don’t do a good enough job in training lawyers in those skills.

My proudest moment was during a challenging and difficult time in the business, and somebody who was in a position of power asked me: ‘What would you do if you were me?’ I think that’s ultimately the goal – it’s our role as the counselor, the consigliere, to develop that trust.

Another proud moment would be the opening of the Levi’s® Stadium. We put so much blood, sweat and tears into that, and it was a group effort of literally thousands of people – from architects, to financiers, to construction workers, to lawyers, to salespeople. You have this incredible communal feeling of hard work that pays off in a physical thing that you can actually see.

The difficult moments, when there’s turnover or change, where human livelihoods and families are involved – those are the most challenging moments in football. It can also be tough when public perception does not match the reality inside an organization. Thankfully I enjoy what I do, so it doesn’t diminish my love of the game, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t hard days. When you’re having a tough season, it is hard on everyone, although obviously hardest on the players and coaches.

We do a lot of work at the intersection of football and science. One of the things that I didn’t foresee before I came to work here was how many software agreements we would enter into – there are a lot of really interesting companies that we partner with.

Even though the world is moving very fast in terms of technology, I don’t think the skills that we as in-house counsel have to exercise have changed that much. It’s about your skills at client service, at understanding the big picture, and then being able to communicate to others, particularly non-lawyers, what that big picture is and how the pieces fit together. And then, of course, having really excellent contract and drafting skills, strong negotiation skills, and being a good issue spotter.

Legal departments are often viewed as cost centres, but that’s unfair, because the deal doesn’t close without a lawyer doing the contract. We limit losses – both in business deals and in litigation. As general counsel, we struggle on that side of innovation – how do we demonstrate our value in a world that’s very based on metrics? That’s why a lot of us use things like contract management systems, to show how many contracts we’re turning out, and how quickly we’re turning them out.

When I think about real innovation, a lot of that is just the everyday problem-solving that lawyers do. That’s where I think lawyers are actually more creative than often people give them credit for.

Looking forward at the role of general counsel, I expect that, given the brand reputation issues that companies are running into, there will be a greater emphasis on the role of the GC as that internal watchdog. I’m always wary of the word ‘compliance’ because I think it has this connotation that you’re a paper pusher, whereas I think what really is required of the role is excellent judgement and ethics. People are going to be looking for a GC who has a strong moral compass and an ability to read situations and pick up on things – to not just make sure that you’re following things by the book, but that there is not something that is actually ripping at the fabric of the organization, even if you have checked all the technical boxes.

It will be interesting to see how much more independence the GC role ends up having. The extent that it’s subordinate to some other executive roles may limit its ability to be the check in the balance of powers – so it will be interesting to see that evolve.